Here are 69 books that The Essential Tales of H. P. Lovecraft fans have personally recommended if you like
The Essential Tales of H. P. Lovecraft.
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Both my parents graduated with degrees in fine arts and were teachers. I was lucky to grow up in a Chinese family where drawing and reading comic books were encouraged. My parents understood that comics would help a visual learner like me to develop an interest in reading. Every weekend, my parents took me to local libraries, where I read not only comics but tons of books on history, folklore, and mythologies. I found those tales fascinating. These tales planted seeds of curiosity and imagination deeply in me, and they helped mold me in becoming the author-illustrator I am today.
The Percy Jackson series reminded me of how incredibly fun Greek mythology was, and it widened my world in seeing how stories could be deeply inspired by ancient mythologies, but could also seamlessly relate to young readers.
The pace was fast, the dialogues were hilarious, and the adventure was satisfying. I especially love how many of the gods in the book remained mostly true to their personalities from the original myths, but they were slightly tweaked to fit modern taste.
The Lightning Thief: the First book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series.
The first bestselling book in Rick Riordan's phenomenally successful Percy Jackson series.
Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. I never asked to be the son of a Greek God. I was just a normal kid, going to school, playing basketball, skateboarding. The usual. Until I accidentally vaporized my maths teacher. That's when things started really going wrong. Now I spend my time fighting with swords, battling monsters with my friends, and generally trying to stay alive.
I’m a Canadian author and artist that loves to write and draw the darker side of fantasy. Ever since I was a child, I have adored mythology, horror, and the creatures and worlds that are present within the fantasy genre. The world of fantasy has unlimited imagination, and its lore and structure grow constantly, which gives endless ideas to us writers to create endless brilliant realms and the creatures that dwell within them.
The Artemis Fowl series is one of my favourite reads. The Lost Colony was especially an enjoyable read due to its time traversing and presence of demons and magic. I recommend this novel and the entire Artemis Fowl series if you love a well-paced and enjoyable read into one of the many intricate worlds of fantasy. This novel is one of the many that inspired me to become a fantasy writer and gave me some inspiration and ideas when coming up with the storyline for my first novel.
Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony is the stunning fifth audio adventure in Eoin Colfer's mega-selling Artemis Fowl series, read by the actor Adrian Dunbar.
Ten millennia ago, the fairy people were defeated in a great battle with mankind, forcing them to move underground. Only the 8th family of fairies remained undefeated: the demons. But now one demon has discovered the secrets of the fairy world, and if humans get hold of this information, the fairies are in BIG trouble. Only one person can prevent this disaster - teenage criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl
I’m a Canadian author and artist that loves to write and draw the darker side of fantasy. Ever since I was a child, I have adored mythology, horror, and the creatures and worlds that are present within the fantasy genre. The world of fantasy has unlimited imagination, and its lore and structure grow constantly, which gives endless ideas to us writers to create endless brilliant realms and the creatures that dwell within them.
Dread Island was an enjoyable read for me due to its mix of Lovecraftian horror intertwined with the old tales of Huckleberry Fin. The way Joe R. Lansdale depicted his version of the story was incredible and gave me the insight that anything can be made into a horror story. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys horror, especially Lovecraftian-style horror.
Limited to remaining stock on hand! This "Monster Lit" mash-up novella from modern horror master Joe R. Lansdale, a highlight from the recent Classics Mutilated anthology, combines Lovecraft and Mark Twain in a way that can only be described as brilliant. Or, as Lansdale.
I’m a Canadian author and artist that loves to write and draw the darker side of fantasy. Ever since I was a child, I have adored mythology, horror, and the creatures and worlds that are present within the fantasy genre. The world of fantasy has unlimited imagination, and its lore and structure grow constantly, which gives endless ideas to us writers to create endless brilliant realms and the creatures that dwell within them.
The Tekken fighting game franchise has always been an inspiration to me. When this comic book series came out, I was beyond thrilled, and it definitely didn’t disappoint. Tekken is a series about a family battle between a son, father, and grandfather, all possessing a form of cursed bloodline and the desire for power and to become the best there is within a fighting tournament. This book and its visuals helped me finalize some of the character aspects within my first novel and helped me picture fight scenes being more powerful and ferocious. I recommend this book and its series to any who likes fantasy-like fights and fighting games/books.
Based upon the biggest fighting videogame franchise of all time, Titan Comics/Bandai Namco's brand new TEKKEN comic series brings the fight right to the page in a bid to determine the true King of the Iron Fist! With a history colored by betrayal and bloody violence, the Mishima Clan are not your average family. Now something emerges that threatens to tear not only this broken dynasty but the entire known universe - asunder!
I'm a horror writer based in Colorado, and I spent my childhood in a variety of wild, untamed places. Horror that uses location as its antagonist is one of my favorite things because I understand how quickly–and easily–a beautiful place can become sinister. It’s not enough to go to a scary place; these books are about what happens when the scary place starts to grow roots inside you, how it changes you. I have written two books that deal with this to some extent, the first about an abandoned coal mine, and the second about Antarctica, and if you like any of these, I hope you’ll consider trying one of mine!
The Hollow Places follows Kara, who has returned to her childhood home in North Carolina, as she takes over running her uncle’s museum of eccentricities after he’s injured. If you love nature-based horror as much as I do, this is a must-read–when a portal opens up in the museum, Kara goes through it into a willow-filled, marshy world of rivers and doors and terrifying, hungry creatures. She has to find a way to protect her home from this new world, which seems desperate to spill into hers and consume it, leaving it hollow.
Recently divorced and staring down the barrel of moving back in with her parents, Carrot really needs a break. And a place to live. So when her Uncle Earl, owner of the eclectic Wonder Museum, asks her to stay with him in exchange for cataloguing the exhibits, of course she says yes.
The Wonder Museum is packed with taxidermy, shrunken heads, and an assortment of Mystery Junk. For Carrot, it's not creepy at all: she grew up with it. What's creepy is the hole that's been knocked in one of the museum walls, and the corridor behind it. There's just…
I’ve been a fanatic of horror, especially Gothic horror since I was about eight years old when I read all of Poe’s short stories. It’s the genre I read most often and the one I’m dedicated to writing about. For me, the most effective horror novels have a setting that is as rich and fully developed as any of the characters. You can battle vampires, zombies, and all of the other delightful monsters out there, but how do you battle what’s trapped in the walls around you? How do you fight a home that hates you? Or one that loves you too much to let you go? It’s endlessly fascinating.
The novel’s prose is breathtaking. Jackson tells us from the start that Hill House is not sane and that sets the tone for the unraveling of the other characters’ minds.
For me, one of the best things about the novel is that it gives the reader space to create their own horrors. Nothing is explicitly stated and that makes it all the more frightening. Add to that an unreliable narrator and this novel captured my mind from the moment I read it.
Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories…
What could possibly captivate the mind more than monsters? As a kid, I eagerly consumed books from authors like R.L. Stine, Stephen King, and HP Lovecraft. I watched George Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter, and played games like Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade, andThe Call of Cthulhu.When I discovered monster studies in my PhD years—a way to read monsters as cultural productions that tell us something about the people that create them—I was hooked. Ever since, I get to continue reading my favorite books, watching my favorite movies, and playing my favorite games. It’s just that now someone’s paying me to do it.
Part theory, part media analysis, and all awesome, Nelson’s work traces the rise of the “Protestant Gothic” tradition in the United States and the way in which this dark and gloomy literary tradition came to inform most of the media we consume today. From zombies to vampires, HP Lovecraft to Guillermo del Toro, Nelson reveals the ways that the Protestant Gothic has shaped modern literature, television, and film into a space of religious imagining that we don’t even recognize.
The Gothic, Romanticism's gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.
To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She…
My dad instilled in me a love of, and respect for, history and an avid interest in golden-era Hollywood. In my adult life as a professional writer, that paternal guidance has translated into eight books about various aspects of old Hollywood, with a growing focus on the intersection of Hollywood and World War II. My career to date was punctuated by the international success of Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, which detailed the future star’s very hard life in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation. Dad didn’t live long enough to know I’d written anything, let alone a number of books he would have enjoyed reading.
Leonard Maltin shot to prominence as a youth publishing the annual Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, with each new edition becoming an instant New York Times bestseller. Maltin also served a long stint as an on-air correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, where he earned backstage access to generations of movie stars.
His recently published memoir details his early obsession with the movies and then his slow but steady rise as one of Hollywood’s leading historians. I love this book most for its insights into the old stars that Maltin met—stars who knew him from his books and TV work and opened up about their own histories, making this book a valuable resource for film scholars.
Hollywood historian and film reviewer Leonard Maltin invites readers to pull up a chair and listen as he tells stories, many of them hilarious, of 50+ years interacting with legendary movie stars, writers, directors, producers, and cartoonists. Maltin grew up in the first decade of television, immersing himself in TV programs and accessing 1930s and ‘40s movies hitting the small screen. His fan letters to admired performers led to unexpected correspondences, then to interviews and publication of his own fan magazine. Maltin’s career as a free-lance writer and New York Times-bestselling author as well as his 30-year run on Entertainment…
My Swedish grandmother first introduced me to the horror genre when I was a small boy. Her folktales of trolls and witches really fueled my imagination! Then, when I was in junior high, my father encouraged me to read Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. I didn’t get hooked on things Gothic, however, until I heard the lyrics of Jim Morrison and the Doors in high school. After college, I became a freelance writer. I quickly learned that 80% of my spooky stuff got accepted by magazines while only 10% of my general interest work was published. That said, it’s no wonder I became a horror writer!
The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre showcases some of the weirder stories of the horror genre. “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” put the “f” in fear! H.P.’s evil space creature, Cthulhu, also makes an appearance in this anthology.
“H.P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”—Stephen King
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”—H.P. Lovecraft
This is the collection that true fans of horror fiction must have: sixteen of H.P. Lovecraft’s most horrifying visions, including:
The Call of Cthulu: The first story in the infamous Cthulhu mythos—a creature spawned in the stars brings a menace of unimaginable evil to threaten all mankind. The Dunwich Horror: An evil man’s desire to perform an unspeakable…
I’m a kid that grew up during the Blockbuster era. I spent a lot of time in the horror and sci-fi section, going aisle by aisle renting everything they had. Monsters were like vital nutrients to me, but it wasn’t just the monsters themselves that I found appealing. It was what they taught us about ourselves. So many good stories use monsters as a tool to tell interesting and poignant stories about humanity. Doesn’t matter if it’s a walking undead creature or an otherwordly cosmic destroyer, monsters reflect people, and I try to embody that sentiment in my own work.
HP Lovecraft created a great cast of cosmic characters, but it’s debatable that other writers have done a better job utilizing them. Cthulhu Armageddon takes Lovecraftian horror and puts an adventure spin on it. The real highlight is the book’s main character, who has to navigate this post-apocalyptic world and the various creatures within it while coming to terms with his own insecurities.
“Under an alien sky where gods of eldritch matter rule, the only truth is revenge.”
CTHULHU ARMAGEDDON is the story of a world 100 years past the rise of the Old Ones which has been reduced to a giant monster-filled desert and pockets of human survivors (along with Deep Ones, ghouls, and other “talking” monsters).
John Henry Booth is a ranger of one of the largest remaining city-states when he’s exiled for his group’s massacre and suspicion he’s “tainted.” Escaping with a doctor who killed her husband, John travels across the Earth’s blasted alien ruins to seek the life of…
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